Penguin History of the United States of America

by Hugh Brogan

  The execution of Sacco and Vanzetti touched off further riots in London, Paris, Germany and elsewhere. But the episode was no more than a transient embarrassment to American foreign policy. The permanent difficulties were domestic. The Harding and Coolidge administrations were aware of the need for some sort of co-operation with the European powers, but they had to move with the utmost caution, for fear of alarming Congressional isolationists, such as Senator Borah of Idaho, well-nicknamed a ‘Son of the Wild Jackass’. Though Borah could never be got to believe it, isolation in the strict sense of the word was impossible. The United States, now the world’s creditor, had too many overseas interests to protect. There was the question of war-debts. The Americans wanted to be paid; their former allies – Britain, France, Italy, Belgium (the new Soviet Union repudiated imperial Russia’s obligations) – felt that this insistence was ungracious: if America had given treasure to the common cause, so had they, and oceans of blood as well. The trouble was that Americans in the twenties no longer accepted that they had been right to make common cause with the Europeans. These then argued that they could pay their debts only if they were allowed either to collect handsome reparations from Germany or to export goods to the American market (thereby earning dollars with which to meet their obligations). The magnanimous Americans were against reparations (why be beastly to the Germans?), but the debts were another matter: as President Coolidge remarked, ‘They hired the money, didn’t they? Let them pay it!’ And of course there could be no question of modifying the prohibitive tariff. It was the same old brick wall. So the ex-Allies negotiated what settlements they could with Washington. Congress set up a War Debts Commission which was dominated by the Secretaries of State, the Treasury, and Commerce (Hughes, Mellon and Hoover) and showed itself as reasonable as possible within the bounds laid down by the legislature. Meanwhile many Americans, and American financial institutions, were hurrying to invest in Germany as she recovered from the devastation of the war and its aftermath. The money soon went from Germany to her former enemies, as reparations; and then found its way back to the United States as payment of war-debt. It was a neat and symmetrical system, fine as long as it lasted, but it was irrelevant to the real problems of the international trading system, and indeed by distracting attention from them made them worse. Once more the provincial prejudices of the provincial assembly of a provincial nation were laying up a great store of trouble for the future.

  Hampered though they were, the statesmen did their best. Hughes stage-managed the Naval Conference; poor President Harding decided to take America into the World Court. He was still immensely popular; like Wood-row Wilson he decided to carry his cause to the people, and in the summer of 1923 set out on a speaking-tour through the West. He was following a bad example. The tour was too much for a man in Harding’s state of health (he had a weak heart); even a holiday in Alaska proved too exhausting, and there was no sign that the people were any readier to come to the rescue of the World Court than they had been to come to the rescue of the League of Nations. Deeply depressed, by this, and his illness, and his knowledge that scandals were about to erupt, Harding reached San Francisco, where he suddenly died on 2 August 1923, to the consternation of his countrymen. As his funeral train crossed the country on its way back to Washington they turned out to register their sorrow and love as they had never done since the death of Lincoln.

  Then the scandals came out. There was Charlie Forbes, the cheery creature whom Harding had put in charge of the new Veterans Administration. The VA provided medical care, pensions and other benefits for old soldiers: it provided ample opportunities for graft, which Forbes had seized. There was Albert B. Fall, the Secretary of the Interior. He had been unanimously confirmed, without a hearing, when his nomination was brought to the Senate; for he was then a Senator himself, from New Mexico. Fall had been indiscreet in accepting loans from a man who was trying to lease Teapot Dome, a hill in Wyoming under which there was supposed to be an oil field, from the Department of the Interior; but what ruined him were the lies he told about the indiscretion, which made everything seem so much worse than it had really been. There was Harry Daugherty, the Attorney-General, Harding’s political manager, who seemed to have traded his political influence for cash.5 Many smaller offenders were exposed, some of whom were driven to suicide. Harding’s reputation plummeted and did not begin to recover until the 1970s.

  It looked for a moment as if the Republican hold on power was loosening. The post-war recession had profoundly injured American farmers, cutting exports by half and driving down agricultural prices. The 1922 elections had been good for progressives, bad for Old Guard Republicans. Now there were the Harding scandals. Fortunately for the party, the new President, like Gerald Ford fifty years later, was just what the situation required. Calvin Coolidge was a man of flinty personal integrity. Furthermore he advertised himself brilliantly without appearing to do so. At the time of Harding’s death he was holidaying at his father’s farm in Vermont, where he had been born and raised. The news that he was now President reached him with some difficulty, as the house was twelve miles from the nearest telegraph station. When a messenger at last arrived, in the middle of the night, Coolidge got up, dressed, and was sworn in by his father, a Notary Public, in the living room, by the light of an oil-lamp. Never was old-fashioned Yankee austerity, Yankee thrift, Yankee character, more conspicuously displayed; never (from the point of view of party managers) more usefully. Coolidge began as he meant to go on.

  He had perhaps the most fascinatingly intricate character of any President since that other hero of Massachusetts, John Adams. There is always another story to leam about ‘Silent Cal’;6 but his historical importance lies in two facts. First, he was a veteran politician, as much so as Harding had been, yet clean and strong-willed as Harding was not. Consequently it was easy enough for him, moving with deliberate speed, to reform the administration in time for the 1924 election, which the Republicans won handily, since the great boom of the twenties was now well under way, the Democrats were hopelessly split (between wets and drys, conservatives and progressives, friends and foes of the Ku Klux Klan) and a third party, the Progressives,7 took the field, their candidate being old Senator La Follette, fighting his last campaign. Coolidge got 15,718,211 votes; the Democrats, 8,385,283; the Progressives, 4,831,289. Second, Coolidge was not only a quietist by temperament and conviction, but a traditional Republican of the truest stripe. He venerated wealth and Andrew Mellon. As President, he thought it was his duty to mind the store while the Republicans ran the country as they saw fit. He intervened in the economic process only to veto the proposals of more active men in Congress.

  He was almost equally supine in foreign affairs, with much more excuse. The isolationist mood had deepened and strengthened; the internationalists were chasing after moonbeams, such as the outlawry of war. Coolidge himself was no isolationist; he never renounced the Wilsonian principles that he had avowed when Governor of Massachusetts, in 1919, in Wilson’s presence. Under his administration the quiet work of re-integrating the United States in the world diplomatic community” went on; negotiations, in which the leading part was played by Charles E. Dawes, first Director of the Budget,8 gradually reduced the reparations question to manageable dimensions. In countless small ways the United States moved forwards, until it was in effect an unofficial member of the League. But the constraints on really effective American diplomacy remained as rigid as ever. What they were was well demonstrated by the story of the Kellogg-Briand Pact. This tragic farce began in the spring of 1927, when the French Prime Minister, Aristide Briand, called publicly for a treaty outlawing war between France and the United States. Briand knew, of course, that such a treaty would be nothing but a sentimental gesture (there was not the remotest likelihood of the two countries going to war, so the treaty would avert nothing), but like all French statesmen he was haunted by the knowledge of France’s military weakness and by fear of a revived Germany. He hoped that a sentimental gesture might
be the first step towards a revival of the Franco-American alliance. The Americans, of course, also saw this possibility, as a trap. Coolidge and Frank B. Kellogg, who had succeeded Hughes as Secretary of State in 1925, had no intention of being destroyed as Wilson and Harding had been destroyed. So they countered Briand’s appeal by asking for a multilateral treaty, by which all the civilized powers would renounce war as an instrument of policy. This suggestion was immensely popular with all the fools who thought that peace could be maintained without effort or expense, and there were many such in every nation. Their governments trooped obediently to the conference table and on 27 August 1928, at Paris, all the major belligerents of the Second World War except the Soviet Union signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact (officially known as the Pact of Paris) renouncing war – and the Soviet Union adhered immediately after the meeting. Its absence from Paris had been through no wish of its own. Once more America was responsible. Since the USSR refused to acknowledge the Tsarist debt, the USA refused to acknowledge the USSR as a legitimate government, and had not let it send emissaries to Paris for fear this might be construed as recognition through the back door. It was a curious way to treat one of the great powers; but then, thanks to the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the United States would never need allies again.

  Meanwhile the years of ‘Coolidge Prosperity’ rolled onwards. It was a happy, hopeful epoch, and in retrospect it is sadly clear that it would not have taken very much wisdom to realize its promise. The most controversial aspect of American life at the time was undoubtedly prohibition. The great experiment had got into dreadful difficulties almost at once. Congress never made funds available to pay for an adequate number of enforcement officers: wisely, because the number would have had to be astronomical. As a result the temptation was irresistible to smuggle booze into the United States by land and sea; to manufacture it in the privacy of one’s own cellar; to run speakeasies (illegal saloons) where it could be sold at extortionate prices, or bootlegging businesses (criminal grocers) which brought it and the same extortionate prices to the private citizen’s doorstep. It was all especially tempting to the thriving mobs of New York and Chicago. Professional, organized crime, in fact, grew so profitable, thanks to the Eighteenth Amendment, that it has been big business ever since: when prohibition ended it took up illegal gambling, drug-smuggling, prostitution and general extortion instead. The price of official righteousness comes high. In the case of prohibition, $2,000,000,000 worth of business was simply transferred from brewers and bar-keepers to bootleggers and gangsters, who worked in close co-operation with the policemen and politicians they corrupted. Blackmail, protection rackets and gangland murders became all too common, and no one was punished. In New York city, out of 6,902 cases involving breaches of the Volstead Act (the law, passed in 1919, which was supposed to enforce the Eighteenth Amendment), 6,074 were dismissed for ‘insufficient evidence’ and 400 were never even tried. Out of 514 persons arrested in gambling raids in 1926 and 1927 only five were held for trial.

  No wonder, then, that prohibition was once more a matter of controversy in Coolidge’s time: ‘wets’ emerged to do battle with the ‘drys’. Yet today it seems less important than the newly revealed capacity of the American economy to grow through the invention and manufacture of consumer goods (washing-machines were making their first appearance); or than the experiments in modern government which were being made in some of the states, above all in New York, where the remarkable Al Smith (1873 – 1944), an honest man sprung from Tammany Hall, was Governor, and was gathering round him a generation of equally remarkable younger men and women – Harry Hopkins, Frances Perkins, Robert Moses, Franklin Delano Roosevelt – who were to become widely known elsewhere before very long.9 Even the South began to show signs of life. The new Klan, which in 1924 seemed to be sweeping all before it, was soon discovered to be hollow: beyond its talent for terrorizing Jews, Catholics and blacks in rural parts it had little to offer but scandals of greed, corruption and sexual hypocrisy. By 1926 it had passed its peak, and the way was cleared for several portents of change, the most vivid of which was young Huey Long of Louisiana (1893 – 1935), who was elected Governor of that state in 1928 and proceeded to turn it upside down.

  Long’s initial strength was as a spokesman for the bitter grievances of Southern white farmers. For the prosperity of the twenties – this was perhaps its crucial weakness – by no means encompassed all Americans, and those whom it excluded were hard put to it indeed. The wartime boom in cotton collapsed in 1920; next year the boll weevil wiped out 30 per cent of the crop; two bumper years in the mid-twenties simply destroyed the price of cotton again. Meanwhile, the New England textile industry collapsed under competition from mills in the South, where labour costs, because of the general poverty, were low: bankruptcies were commonplace, and in ten years (1923 – 33) the workforce employed in the industry shrank from 190,000 to less than 100,000.

  Some industrial workers had their difficulties; but the farming population – still nearly one-third of the whole nation in 1920 – was the largest group of victims. Its produce came off the land in ever-increasing abundance; but the domestic market was saturated, and the high tariffs prevented foreigners from earning the dollars they needed for buying American crops. Besides, the United States was not the only country with a food surplus. Canada, Australia, even (in that pre-collectivist period) Russia were effective competitors. The Republican administrations did not believe in direct assistance to farmers, and when an aid bill was passed by Congress Coolidge vetoed it. Actually, the McNary-Haugen Bill (as it was called) offered only illusory help, butto the farmers this was 1896 all over again. Good weather continued; they could not agree among themselves to restrict the acreage they planted (or at least they could not abide by their agreements) so bumper harvests continued too, prices continued low and their desperation increased. For the first time in American history the farm population began to shrink. It was approximately 1,500,000 smaller in 1930 than it had been in 1920, and was now only a quarter of the total population. Hundreds of thousands of farmers and their families had left the land for the cities for good. In so far as the land was over-populated (for the tractor was making agriculture less labour-intensive) this may have been, in the long run, a healthy development: but it was not a joyous migration.

  Yet enough voters were doing well in 1928 to make Coolidge’s re-election a certainty if he wanted it. He did not. ‘I do not choose to run,’ he said, with characteristic precision, and when it became certain that he meant it the Republicans turned inevitably to the third giant of the Harding Cabinet. Herbert Hoover had bulked large in American imaginations ever since his heroic labours during and after the First World War. As Secretary of Commerce he had vastly extended the importance of his department, and accelerated the modernization of American industry, thereby further accelerating prosperity. He had recently refreshed his humanitarian reputation by once again organizing a successful relief programme when the Mississippi broke its banks in 1927, devastating an immense area. The Republican party regulars disliked him for his shyness, coldness and disdain for politicians, but they needed him. He was the most popular Republican, the only man certain to beat the most popular Democrat, Al Smith.

  The race between these two men was in one sense the race between the past and the future: between a man born on a farm, who stood for the old, predominantly rural, Protestant America, which believed in self-help above all other social virtues, and a man born in the city, who stood for immigrants and Americans of immigrant stock, a Catholic, someone who understood the new, complex demands that politicians have to meet in modern society. Yet, in another perspective, both were moderns, for Hoover had proved himself a highly capable administrator and had enormous attractions, as ‘the Great Engineer’, for the professional middle class; and in another, both were primitive, for Smith, like Hoover, had risen from extreme poverty and believed in the old American values of hard work, thrift and personal honesty which had always guided him and, he thought, made h
is success possible. Tragically, both men were to show themselves unequal to the challenges ahead.

  The election demonstrated that many parts of the country were still bitterly suspicious of city politicians, wets and Catholics. The Protestant clergy flung itself into the fray as never before. One Baptist preacher, the Reverend Mordecai F. Ham, told his congregation, ‘If you vote for Al Smith you’re voting against Christ and you’ll all be damned.’ When Smith toured the South-West, fiery crosses, the symbol of the Klan, blazed in the fields, and for the first time since Reconstruction a Republican Presidential candidate carried several ex-Confederate states (Texas, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, and Tennessee, which had gone for Harding in 1920). But what above all defeated Smith was prosperity. Hoover spoke of the permanent elimination of poverty being at hand; he clearly meant it, he was energetic, able, full of plans; he talked of two cars in every garage. People believed him and voted accordingly. It was worse than 1916, when they voted for the man who had kept them out of war.

  Already the forces which were to destroy Coolidge prosperity were at work. Indeed, the first signs of trouble came as early as 1926, when the sale of new housing began to slacken. This had various causes, among them the collapse of a land-boom in Florida, where thousands of sun-hungry Northerners had been hoaxed into buying pieces of swamp, miles from the sea, in the belief that they were getting valuable properties near the beach in a paradise of sand, sunlight and gentle sea-breezes. The exposure of some spectacular frauds, the collapse of the Florida railroad system and a couple of hurricanes opened their eyes and set back the development of Miami by twenty-five years. ‘The world’s greatest poker game’, as some cynic had dubbed the boom, was over. A more serious cause of the housing slowdown was the fact that the market was becoming saturated, like the market for farm products. Of course there were still tens of millions of Americans who needed better housing than they were ever likely to get, but they had no money. By 1926 those who had money had usually already obtained their houses or mortgages; and though new buyers came on to the market every year, they were not numerous enough to sustain the boom. This mattered, because the building trade is labour and materials-intensive. To put up a house requires many pairs of hands at every stage, from manufacturing the bricks or cutting the limber to putting in the plumbing; and every house that is built is a small stimulus to half a dozen industries – not to mention that the occupants will add to the band of prosperous consumers, since wants increase with house-ownership. A faltering, then, in the building industry was a bad signal. Others followed. By the late summer of 1929 demand had slackened so much that all the major indices of industrial production were turning down – warnings of impending layoffs and reduced dividends, if of nothing worse.